Five of the best at the Louvre
How to engage with the world's most popular museum if you've never been
The Louvre! One of the world’s great art experiences, but for the uninitiated, it can be not so easy. Once you have got in, walked down through the glass Pyramid in the middle of the vast courtyard, and found yourself in the giant atrium, your quest to see actual art is not over. It is bewildering in the extreme. Loads of different entrances, a whole shopping centre, various cloakrooms and another giant queue for the loos. And what is the Denon Pavilion? Fear not.
This Substack is devoted to the (in my view) five masterpieces which will give you a decent introduction to this overwhelming collection in a former royal palace. The Louvre is not only the world’s most visited museum but a sort of French cultural standard before which the rest of the world must cower. By any measure it is a phenomenal collection.
1. Winged Victory of Samothrace (190 BCE)
The thing to grasp about the Louvre is that it is British Museum, National Gallery, National Portrait Gallery, Wallace Collection and V&A all rolled into one. There is a lot of Graeco-Roman sculpture, of which this piece is one, to take on board. Never mind. Just follow the signs to the Winged Victory. It is at the top of the main staircase within the Denon Pavilion, and must be seen at the start of this (and any) visit to the Louvre.
What drama stands before you, giant, uncompromised.
Discovered on the Greek island of Samothrace in 1863, the Winged Victory is a breathtaking sculpture of Nike, the goddess of Victory, alighting on the prow of a ship. It dates from 190 BCE. The wind beats her wet mantle back against her body, so much that you see the female form through the cloth.